


Nessun maggior dolore

by OldShrewsburyian



Series: Time's a strange fellow [1]
Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Angst, Angst and Feels, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Bechdel Test Pass, Canonical Character Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Everything Hurts, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, POV Female Character, POV Third Person, Poor Lucy, Post-Finale, Shippy Gen, Sweaters, Vodka, and the wisecracking murderous bastard who wears them, just so we're clear on that point
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-05
Updated: 2018-06-05
Packaged: 2019-05-18 09:32:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14850230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldShrewsburyian/pseuds/OldShrewsburyian
Summary: I am the kind of person whose horribly pedantic brain asks "Why is a man with a traumatically torn-up shoulder muscle wearing a pull-over sweater?" and then concocts a painful answer to that question.This presumes that there's a bit more of a time-lapse between the team's return and the episode's finale than we're shown. Angst and literary allusions are my specialty; proceed accordingly.





	Nessun maggior dolore

**Author's Note:**

  * For [qqueenofhades](https://archiveofourown.org/users/qqueenofhades/gifts).



Lucy reflects that time travel demands new metaphors. _Gone to hell_ is entirely too mild an expression for what has happened to this day. She dabs patiently at her own rapidly swelling bruises, feeling strangely detached from the whole process. Shock apparently dulls even the sting of hydrogen peroxide. She notices that her lip is trembling, and stops it. Dispassionately, she applies sticking plaster and regards the results with some skepticism. The cut over her cheekbone seems likely to leave a scar. If it does, the mark will be substantial — hard to explain away in just about any time period. Besides, she’s not sure that facial scarring would really work with her professorial persona. (“Very enthusiastic.” “Talks too much sometimes, but is helpful if you ask.” “Gives open-note tests, has gnarly facial scar.” Do kids even say _gnarly_ any more? Probably not.) She expels a breath, hears its shaking. Staring herself in the mirror (her mother’s bones, the eyes of a woman who has killed, who was ready to kill again) will achieve nothing. Resolutely, she turns on her heel. She is conscious of holding her spine straight, making her steps firm. A door bangs in the corridor and she jumps a foot sideways, bringing her hip into painful contact with the corner of a table. _Because of course,_ she thinks, _even this day could get worse._

Denise Christopher strides into the common space, looking grim but also, despite the professional suit, behind the FBI-regulated angle of the jaw, surprisingly fragile. She’s making a gesture with her hands that Lucy struggles not to classify as _wringing_. Her eyes drawn by the movement, she notices something under her fingernails that looks suspiciously, horribly like blood. Lucy drags her eyes back to the older woman’s face.

“I have some calls to make,” says the agent, her voice hard as ice and just as ready to shatter. “There are people who need to be — informed. We’re running low on painkillers. And I’d like a doctor to look you _all_ over.”

“Is that blood?” Lucy blurts out. 

Denise sighs. “Yes.” She sounds too exasperated, too exhausted to be other than brutally honest. “There was a time when I thought training in emergency surgery was excessive.” Lucy twists her own hands together, rather wishing she hadn’t asked. “Lucy — ”

“Don’t,” she says. Her own voice sounds small, lost. “I’m sorry — thank you — I just can’t — ”

“Understood.” The other woman’s eyes are soft. “We’ll talk later, yeah?”

Lucy can only manage a nod before heading off at a slightly unsteady stride. Interrupting Mason is something she doesn’t dare do, even for the sake of his whisky stash, even for the sake of saying she’s sorry. What good would that do? They are all uselessly, desperately sorry. Jiya’s door is ajar, and Lucy pauses for a moment outside it, but hears only a faint, irregular breathing. If she’s finally sobbed herself to exhaustion, Lucy isn’t going to risk interrupting her. She isn’t about to knock on Wyatt’s door. There may come a time when they can sympathize with each other on finding out that those closest to them are willingly in the pay of an evil empire, but this is not it. Lucy stands in the corridor and shivers. Agent Christopher’s voice is barely audible beneath the hum of the fans, the intermittent creaks and groans of the metal siding. Lucy shivers again. 

She can’t quite bring herself to go in without knocking. But when her double tap receives no response, she tentatively slides the door open a couple of feet.

He says only: “Come.” She slips around the door and shuts it behind her. Why precisely she remains leaning on the handle she could not articulate. He is, at least, semi-fully dressed, though something about the angle of his jaw and the perspiration at his hairline suggests that this might be a recent development. Lucy notices, with a curious pang, that the old-fashioned singlet is not pulled even, having been to all appearances recently and painfully shrugged on. 

“Do you — ” she makes an incomplete gesture — “do you need a hand?”

He smiles at that — brief, exhausted, genuine — and she is so damn grateful for this hint of normalcy that she feels an answering pull at her own mouth.

“In a very literal sense,” he tells her solemnly, “I do. If you wouldn’t mind,” he adds.

“I’m offering.” _Apparently_ , observes the voice in her head tasked with appraising dubious decisions. She tells it to shut up. 

Keeping clothes in a filing cabinet is one of the less weird accommodations that they’ve had to make, living in the bunker. “Third drawer down,” he says. It requires a special kind of jerk-and-pull movement to get the thing open, even with two hands. She’s never met a filing cabinet that hasn’t. And either he’s already out of it on the meds that Denise must have given him, or she’s inexplicably failing to find what she’s looking for.

“Why don’t you own any button-down _shirts_?” She manages, barely, to keep from swearing, but her voice has gone high and hard, dangerously close to a tone that would make him say her name with the kind of concern that she just can’t handle right now, towards the end of this Dantesque nightmare of a day.

“Ah,” says Flynn, and stops. She straightens, fists jammed against her hipbones, still glaring at the stacks of sweaters, as though that would help. “Iris,” he says finally. “She — she always complained about the buttons getting caught in her hair.”

Lucy feels as though the Lifeboat has taken off half a second before she expected it to, as though she’s suspended, dizzy and sick, in space and time. She finds she cannot imagine the expression on his face.

Flynn clears his throat. “Besides,” he says, “there are enough buttons in the eighteenth century to last any man a lifetime.” It’s only a hoarse simulacrum of his usual teasing, but it’s enough to unfreeze her, to set her rummaging in the piles and setting them to rights again after she’s found what she wants. Lucy takes a deep breath and turns to face him.

“Here.” She figures that any sweater a man chooses to go with a lie-in and an obscenely sugary cereal is a good bet, and she’s rewarded with a small smile, a tightening at the corners of his mouth. “So,” says Lucy. “I think it’ll work best if we do your bad side first…”

“Yes.”

“Sorry.” She forces herself to exhale. “Of course, you’ve done this before.” Still: it is something of a surprise when he extends his right arm with something like docility, lets his hand rest gently on her shoulder, holding the arm perpendicular while she works the sleeve carefully up. “Good thing I’m nurse-sized.” This earns her another smile, lopsided this time. She pauses when she is nearly at the shoulder. His breathing has become more shallow, more rapid, and for a fleeting moment she wonders when she became the sort of person who notices such things.

“Ready?” He gives her a tight nod, and she stands on tiptoe as he lowers his head. One moment she is trying to ignore the sound that he makes, and the next she is vertiginously reminded of her own childhood, obediently stretching her arms overhead for a turtleneck, or sullenly accepting a cardigan for the foreseen chill of long summer evenings. She is not sure which of them gives a strangled sob as he emerges, a little wild-eyed, only slowly focusing on her. His pallor has acquired a tint she can only think of as _ashen,_ and she wishes she hadn’t read so many Victorian novels in high school. She starts to bite her lip, and stops, wincing.

“Almost there,” he says, as if she were the one in need of reassurance. But she can see his breathing change as he reaches for the other sleeve, and his hand tightens a little on her shoulder. “There,” he says, and smiles, and she is undone.

“Lucy,” he says, and her breathing thickens to sobbing, and she is suddenly too tired to stand and weeping in terrible, uncontrollable gulps against the soft fabric of his recently-donned sweater.

“I — ” she begins. “I — ”

“Shhh.” It is the only response he makes for some time, and she allows her other arm to go around his waist as she cries herself out. At last, Lucy can take stock of the fact that her face is hot and the fabric beneath her cheek is damp (and they are sure as _hell_ not changing him out of it), and her friend/colleague/emotionally-supportive assassin is standing with his sound arm hooked around her, swaying slightly on his feet. 

“I…” she begins, and has to restart. “I’m sorry — I shouldn’t — you’re the one who — ”

“Lucy.” It silences her, and she shivers again. “Lucy,” says Flynn again, “this is not the first time I have been shot.” She hiccups, a little hysterically, and tries to nod. “Nor will it be the last.” She finds herself pulled a little closer. “You lost your mother. That — is an infinitely greater hurt.”

“She used to give me sweaters for my birthday.” It comes out as a whisper. “It was a joke between us.” Carefully, Lucy licks her swollen lips. “Just a little something — you know? — just a little something, in case I got — c-cold…” The weight against the crown of her head is surprising enough that she wonders briefly if he’s going to faint. No; the touch of his lips is swift, and as swiftly withdrawn.

“We should sit down,” manages Lucy.

“Even if I promise to fall backwards?”

She draws an uneven breath of laughter. “Yeah.” She realizes too late that she’s suggested a plan that would involve her sitting on his lap, unless he can manage the ladder to the bunk one-handed, and…

“Couch?” suggests Flynn.

“Yeah,” says Lucy again, and wonders if all she feels is relief. She handles the door; she manages not to look around to confirm how very close he is standing.

“By the way,” says Flynn, and she does not quite keep herself from jumping, “do you mind if I take it tonight?”

“What?” Her mind seems to be ricocheting wildly among possibilities, each with trajectories of consequences as inexorable as the laws of physics.

“The couch,” says Flynn softly, and she can’t shake the feeling that he knows her confusion as clearly as if it were written on the walls. “Easier than the top bunk.”

“Oh,” says Lucy. “Yeah. Of course.” They walk easily in step, not quite touching. “I have vodka,” she observes, inconsequentially. In response to his raised eyebrow, she adds: “I’ve only had ibuprofen.”

Again the improbable smile at the corner of his mouth. “I haven’t. But a sip to keep you company.”

“You’ve never _sipped_ vodka in your life.”

“Touché, Professor.” He has finished the process of carefully folding himself into the couch by the time she retrieves the bottle. She tucks her feet under her, rests her head against his undamaged shoulder as though it were natural that she should. Perhaps it is.

“Why do we do this?” she asks, meaning the hideout, the missions, everything. He takes the vodka between his knees, unscrews the cap with his good hand, waits for her to wrap her fingers around the bottle before answering.

“We can’t do anything else.” 

“Mm.” It does not seem a wholly satisfactory answer. But with his human warmth against the chill of the bunker, the improbability of their passionate alliance, it seems like enough for survival.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is taken from Canto V of Dante's _Inferno_ :
> 
> "Nessun maggior dolore  
> che ricordarsi del tempo felice  
> ne la miseria."
> 
> It can be translated as: "There is no greater sorrow / than remembering happy times / in the midst of pain."
> 
> Incidentally (or not, ahem), it's uttered by one half of a couple who -- at least in Dante's narrative -- only once kissed, but whose souls are permanently inseparable. The woman describes her lover as "the one who never shall be taken from me, who kissed my mouth, trembling." Just... in case anyone would like that mental image.


End file.
